What is the best way to capture and analyze wireless traffic?

Building or securing wireless networks can be a challenge when your tools don’t understand radio waves. Riverbed® AirPcap enables troubleshooting tools like Wireshark® and SteelCentral™ Packet Analyzer to provide information about wireless protocols and radio signals. A complete range of models is available for your wireless capture needs

Features and benefits of AirPcap

“AirPcap is invaluable for troubleshooting and testing new wireless products at the 802.11 level.” - Engineer, Medium Enterprise Telecommunications

Riverbed AirPcap adapters offer an easy way to capture and analyze 802.11 wireless traffic, and include full integration with the popular Wireshark and Riverbed Cascade Pilot network analysis tools. Three AirPcap models are available:

AirPcap Classic gives you the power to capture and analyze low-level 802.11b/g wireless traffic, including control, management, and data frames on your Windows workstation or laptop. Per packet information is also available, such as power, hardware timestamps (in micro-seconds), and receive rate.

AirPcap Nx is a dual-band solution supporting packet capture and injection for 802.11n, 802.11a/b/g legacy modes, and the 4.9 GHz US public safety channels. It features 2 x 2 MIMO with two internal antennas, plus two integrated MC-Card connectors for optional external antennas to enhance performance in the most demanding environments.

“AirPcap gives us the power to observe network problems and come up with a solution rather than just blindly shooting in the dark. It also gives us the ability to measure whether or not changes made to the service have the desired effect.” –IT architect, educational institution

Flexibility and Extensibility Illuminate Solution

“AirPcap gives us the power to observe network problems and come up with a solution rather than just blindly shooting in the dark. It also gives us the ability to measure whether or not changes made to the service have the desired effect.”

Solves monitoring and testing wireless networks with speed and flexibility

Benefits from AirPcap Adapter through:

Flexibility when solving/troubleshooting 802.11 WLAN anomalies

Better portable WLAN analysis

Faster troubleshooting

AirPcap adapter is essential product validation tool

“We design Wi-Fi-equipped consumer products, and AirPcap helps us monitor critical firmware and wireless performance. There isn’t much other competition compared to AirPcap for us. It is considered an essential product validation tool.”

Captures wireless traffic on a single channel

Each AirPcap adapter captures traffic on a single channel at a time; the channel setting for the AirPcap adapter can be changed using the AirPcap Control Panel, or from the “Advanced Wireless Settings” dialog in Wireshark or other tools. Depending on the model of your AirPcap adapter, it can be set to any valid 802.11a/b/g/n channel for packet capture.

Operate in completely passive mode

AirPcap adapters operate in a completely passive mode. This means that they capture the traffic on a channel without associating with an access point or interacting with any other wireless device. Unless you are transmitting with either AirPcap Tx , Ex or Nx, the adapters are not detectable by any other wireless station.

Can also work in monitor mode

The AirPcap adapters can work in Monitor Mode. In this mode, the AirPcap adapter will capture all of the frames that are transferred on a channel, not just frames that are addressed to it. This includes data frames, control frames and management frames.

Can be configured to decrypt WEP-encrypted frames

The AirPcap software can optionally be configured to decrypt WEP-encrypted frames. An arbitrary number of keys can be configured in the driver at the same time, so that the driver can decrypt the traffic of more than one access point at the same time. WPA and WPA2 support is handled by applications such as Wireshark and Aircrack-ng.

Use multiple AirPcap adapters for multi-channel aggregation

When more than one AirPcap adapter is plugged in, the AirPcap Control Panel will show one additional interface: the Multi-Channel Aggregator. The Multi-Channel Aggregator is a virtual capture interface that can be used from Wireshark or any other supported application. Using this capture interface, the application will receive the traffic from all installed USB AirPcap adapters as if it was coming from a single device.

The Multi-Channel Aggregator has its own FCS, Capture Type and FCS Filter settings. These settings, and not those of the physical adapter, will be used when capturing from the Aggregator. Note that it’s not possible to set the channel of the Multi-Channel Aggregator; instead, the channel drop-down box will show a list of aggregated channels. To change the channel of any individual adapter, select the Capture adapter from the Interface drop-down list and set the desired value in the channel drop-down box.

Riverbed provides a limited out-of-the-box warranty for a total of one year from the date of purchase for AirPcap USB adapters. In the event of a hardware failure, the unit may be shipped to Riverbed for repair or replacement.

Riverbed delivers the most complete platform for Location-Independent Computing, turning location and distance into a competitive advantage. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ allows IT to have the flexibility to host applications and data in the most optimal locations while ensuring applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users notice. At more than $1 billion in annual revenue, Riverbed has 25,000+ customers, including 97% of both the Fortune 100 and the Forbes Global 100.